‘The Feeling is Mutual: Interview with scott crow’

Rabble is thrilled to welcome Luisa Black as a contributing writer, and to launch her new interview series The Feeling is Mutual, which will spotlight mutual aid projects around the country and amplify the voices of activists building our future from the ground up.

We
sat down in early September to talk about the connection between
decentralized disaster relief and anti-fascism over a video call. From
the first question, it’s easy to envision him on a bullhorn in the
midst of a restless rabble, bursting with conviction. His energy is
expansive, frenetic, and sympathetic. He punctuates his explanations
with emphatic hand motions and staccato expletives. Every now and then
he interrupts his own discursive tangents with “…fuck! What was the
question again?” and checks with me frequently to make sure what he’s
saying makes sense. We end up wildly diverging from my originally
planned topics, managing to touch on everything from infiltrating
mainstream media messaging, to internal critiques of anti-fascist
organizing, to movement elders and building long-term sustainability.

Interview

On Anarchy

Luisa:
You describe yourself as an anarchist in your books and interviews.
Can you explain what that philosophy means to you and how it looks in
action?

scott:
Well, anarchy is a set of ideas and principles and ethics to live by
that really tries to pursue our own liberation and collective
liberation for those around us. And it’s rooted in the ideas of
autonomy, mutual aid, cooperation, and direct action, as well as being
anti-authoritarian in many ways. And I think I’ve always been that way,
I’ve always bucked the system and I don’t know why, it’s not like I
had some great training. You know, I’m a working class white kid from a
farm-and-ranch town but somewhere, I knew things were different.

So
anarchy is a way to frame things, it’s a political reference for what
we engage in everyday. It’s when we begin to trust and listen to
ourselves and those around us to make decisions about our own lives.
Anarchy is separate from just activism. It takes all different kinds of
forms. It might be how you work, or how you engage with people, or how
you think about the world you see.

The
way I think is, we are all anarchists. People are like “we need law
and order” but I can guarantee you that you and everyone in your family
breaks the law everyday, because there’s so many laws, and you’re not
even trying to be a law-breaker. But anytime you pull up to a stop
light in a rural area and there’s no cars in any direction, and you
just run through the stop light, that’s anarchy. So I think it’s just
listening to ourselves, and listening to our own values, and not being
rigid in those values that makes sense.

That’s
the difference between anarchy and anarchism. Anarchism is much more
ideologically tied to these sets of ideas, but anarchy is just living
and breathing. And it has these similar foundations, but it looks
different anywhere you are, but there are always those themes of mutual
aid and cooperation, autonomy, and direct action, at the root. Is this
boring as shit?

L:
No not at all! I’ve gotten that a lot. I have a very stoic, impassive
“listening” face but I am actually listening intently and digesting and
trying to draw connections.

s:
So if we want to talk about how it’s manifested itself in political
terms rather than just personal terms, look at just what’s happened in

[leftist]

political movements since the late nineties. You’ve seen
anarchy kind of ascend as, I don’t want to say the dominant
idea, but the one with kind of the greatest sphere of influence… it
used to be the communists and socialists with big “C”s and big “S”
ruled, but that’s just not the case anymore.

L:
I was just reading something similar about that shift, from communists
kind of presiding over revolutionary spaces in Brazil. It’s shifted
from communists in that position to anarchists being the facilitators,
the people who are setting up infrastructure for liberatory spaces.

s:
Right! Like in the nineties, there were maybe a few hundred of us.
People identified with the ideas, but politically, it was a hard thing
to say you were an anarchist. You’d show up at protests and you’d be
maybe one of two people [who identify as anarchists] or something, in
hundreds. But now it’s like, you look around and it’s really — “we are
everywhere.”

[giddy laughter on both sides]

L:
At a certain point in your explanation, you said anarchy looks
different for different people, because anarchy means listening to
yourself, your desires, and your internal codes –

s: Absolutely.

L:
— so what happens when two people who are living in this way have two
drastically different internal codes or sets of values? What do you
think would be an anarchist way of coping with that conflict?

s: Well, one thing is to recognize that there can
be conflict. Anarchy doesn’t mean that everything will be
conflict-free… If someone else’s desires and needs don’t impede on my
own… in communal terms, if they’re not trying to extract resources,
time, people, oil, or whatever, if they’re not using violence to do
that, then I think we can come to common agreements without any
intermediaries like lawyers or judges or law enforcement. I think we can
get to that. And if we can’t, then you’re in conflict. That doesn’t
mean that all of a sudden you’re in a battle, I mean it’s a spectrum… It
could escalate to threat of force or force, and we could kind of
speculate in the hypothetical… but they’re unknowns. All I can tell you
is that it’s always different, every time.

L:
Right. So in a scenario where someone is trying to extract resources,
or trying to take away labor or human value away from someone, what
then?

s:
Well, then I think we have a right to defend ourselves by any means
necessary. Malcolm X said it, and he wasn’t an anarchist, but we
as individuals have a right to protect ourselves. Not like a given
right from the constitution, or parliament, or anything like that — I
mean the innate right. I
don’t need a constitution to tell me that you have to fight for
liberation. If you put the boot on my neck or on the necks of those
around me that I’m in solidarity with, then I’m going to rise up and
fight. We’re all going to rise up and fight. That’s just what happens.

But
that doesn’t mean that we’re automatically bringing out guns or batons
to fight. Whatever that means, that depends on how civil society
looks. If it’s legal means, you have a lawyer doing lawyer shit, that’s
what Indigenous people do a lot because that’s the only thing that the
U.S. government recognizes in dealing with that, is legality. Whereas
if they were burning tires like they do in Brazil, or in Argentina,
like the piqueteros, they would just be killed immediately here, if
they did that to try to bring attention to their plight. But they’re
also doing pipeline defense and water protection. And those are
different forms of direct action, a community determining what their
own future is. Their own autonomy.

I’m
not the smartest fucking person on the planet about this shit, there
are so many people who have written so much better shit about this,

[but]

what I can do is make it accessible to, you know, people’s
parents.

On Anti-fascists and Media Messaging

L:
So that brings us neatly to what you’ve lately been in the media
spotlight about, the idea of armed community self-defense. The timing
of our conversation is actually really interesting to me, considering
your background. We’re speaking at the tail end of a string of
international headlines regarding back-to-back natural disasters, as
well as anti-fascist clashes across the country. Could you talk to me a
little bit about your background in natural disaster relief, and how
that led you down the path to armed community self-defense?

s:
So I do see them as disasters, both. I have a broader concept of
disaster. Some people call them crises, but ecological, economic, and
political – those are all different forms of disasters that drive
people to really look for their liberatory potential because there’s
nothing else there, do you know what I mean? Because capitalism has
failed, and the state has failed. I think antifa was just part of that,
it was a response to a political disaster. You can’t not see that
we’re in a political disaster right now. So, [anti-fascism] came to the
forefront as a response to that.

And the thing with the antifa stuff is, I work with Agency,
the anarchist P.R. firm, and we started getting requests probably in
December of last year for a lot of stuff, and we were trying to find
people to speak to, especially after the actions of January 20th. We
started looking for people to talk about it, and we could find literally
no one. Young people who were getting arrested, and even people my age
or a little bit younger who are still a part of it, didn’t want to
speak to the media. So finally, eight months later, I was kind of just
like “fuck it, I’ll do it.” So I just started talking to the media.
Actually, that CNN interview
I did, I probably did that in May or April. It was a long time ago
actually, but then they released it now [after August 12th] and all the
calls came in after that… I thought it was important,
kind of in an immediate sense, to engage in the battle of narratives
that is happening around anti-fascist work and engagements.

L:
That’s absolutely necessary. You’ve mentioned before the need for
people to be talking to the media and seizing control of our own
narrative. Anarchists are so passionate about being in control of our
own lives and our own autonomy in a very concrete sense. It’s important
to be in control of the narratives surrounding your life. It’s
excellent that you’ve been infiltrating those huge media sources. I
wanted to talk to you about this new shift of anti-fascism into the
mainstream. Recently, your interview with CNN was aired and I believe
you did an interview with Fox
as well. What do you think are the setbacks and advantages of that
shift of this heretofore kind of niche tactic into the mainstream? Do
you think there are any disadvantages?

s:
There are disadvantages, but you have to balance it out. The corporate
media is sort of the dinosaur media… They are innoculators in a
population that many of us don’t inhabit. And so there’s sort of two
ways to fight for control of the narrative. One is to create our own
narrative, and we broadcast those amongst our own people and our own
channels, and we can actually have a pretty far reach. And that’s
something that corporate media can’t understand, like why wouldn’t antifa,
or anarchists, or “black bloc” want to talk to us? But [anarchists]
are not trying to reach you. They’re in direct communication with the
people they’re in conflict with, whether that be corporations or
neo-nazis, or whatever. Creating our own narratives is important because
it helps build culture and solidarity, and that’s something we’ve done
really well, through social media as well as all the different
platforms. But it’s also an echo chamber.

The
other [way to fight for control of the narrative] is intervention into
major corporate media. And you have to weigh the cost versus benefit,
because [corporate media is] not going to get it correct…they
definitely want conflict so they can tell a story. When I work in that
land, I’m not talking about the most radical ideas, though they are
perceived as radical. I’m talking about the idea of taking up arms
against nazis and why we would want to fight against fascists. I want
to place those ideas in a broader [historical] context.

This
form of fascism in the U.S. takes a special kind of fighting, and it
takes the media landscape and the cultural landscape to fight too, as
far as I’m concerned. I think it’s important, instead of letting
democratic liberals and the right wing control the narrative about it,
for us to really fight to take control of that narrative.
Think about this, if I can make someone like my mom get on board with
this… She’s not going to fight in the street, but she might consider
herself an anti-fascist if she can say “yeah, I hate fucking racists, I
hate sexism.” If someone like my mom can see herself in
that narrative, that’s powerful. That’s how movements are built and
that’s how the culture of those movements is sustained.

L:
I’ve seen that in my own town. Not necessarily by infiltrating
mainstream media, but just by building relationships with people who
consider themselves moderates, while still being explicit about being
an anarchist. Making a personal relationship with someone where they
can see anarchism normalized. Not necessarily de-fanged, but just like
“this is what an anarchist looks like when they’re just gardening or
grocery shopping.”

s:
We are real people, you know. I come home and take care of my dogs and
things like that and we live our lives, but if we are only presented
in this caricature way… I think it’s important to make others see us
as human, right? The other thing is that one interview doesn’t make or
break anything. That’s the beauty of what I’ve learned over the past
twenty years. Because of the way the internet bubble is, if you’re on
CNN, only certain groups of people are going to see it, if you’re on
It’s Going Down, only certain people are going to see it, but the thing is if the narrative crosses all those landscapes, then you’ve woven a tapestry that can’t be undone.
It reinforces the narrative for other people like us, people who are
isolated, then they can be like “oh my god, other people are talking
about that.” And that’s not about creating empathy among enemies, this
is just internal, just creating a culture amongst ourselves.

On Doxxing and Paranoia

L:
I think what keeps a lot of people who would identify as radical from
talking to the mainstream media is mostly fear of repression and
doxxing?

s:
Yes, absolutely. Sometimes the internal echo chamber within our own
movements gets to be too much and people start thinking that every
action they do is so goddamn important that everybody’s gonna get
doxxed, but that shit doesn’t happen. I’ve been doing anti-fascist work
for twenty-five years, and it doesn’t happen like that. It happens to
some people, but again there’s a cost-benefit analysis with that too.
I’m one of the most prominent faces of anti-fascism, and I mean, I get
hate mail, but I don’t care anything about it.

I
got doxxed by the New York Times, you can’t beat that. [laughter]
‘Cause they inadvertently put my address out and photos of my house. I
used to get letters to my house, but nobody does that any more. They
just send emails, or they tweet like “I hate you” but why would I give a
fuck about that? It can be a serious issue, but if they do it
electronically, it’s just so evaporative. But I’m not saying some
people don’t have lives ruined because of it, I fucking have white
privilege out the goddamn ass to protect myself.

L:
You mentioned that some people think every action is so important and
that they are so at risk of being doxxed. Can you talk a little bit
more about that, and how we can protect ourselves against that
mentality?

s:
Yeah, this is a larger problem within activism in general in the U.S.
We don’t have any political or social movement retention, and
information doesn’t always get passed down, or passed through. For
thirty years I’ve watched tens of thousands of young people come
through, and then leave. Where the hell do they go? They
went to live their own lives. How this relates to that question is
that every new person who comes in wants to think that what they’re
doing is the most important thing on the planet, and it is, to a
degree, but it’s not in the bigger picture of things. It’s just a step
in a direction. When people are coming in, whether they’re young or new
to movements, they’re politically inexperienced. I’ve seen in animal
rights movements, in anarchist movements, in radical environmentalist
movements, in anti-fascist movements, that we begin to think that every
action that we can do, we HAVE to do because some animal’s going to
die, or some tree’s going to be felled. We’re great at being the fire
brigade, to put the fires out, but the thing is the fire is still
smoldering [underneath] because we leave and go do something else.
Politically inexperienced people, they’re afraid, and usually when some
repression does happen, they leave. Then there’s no lineage of
stories, and only the horror stories get passed down.

The
other part of it is that political and social movements think that the
government knows everything about us. Actually, they don’t know shit. I
can tell you that from personal experience, not conjecture. Sure they
can look at Facebook, but if you don’t put everything on Facebook, they
can’t know it.

On Elders and Building Sustainable Movements

s: When people mature, they go through stages. First, they have to reject authority.This
is social psychology. We do this as individuals, and we do this as
groups. As a teenager or later on, you start to question and reject
everything you’ve been taught. At first maybe it’s God, or the police,
your parents maybe, you go “They fucking lied to me!”

Then
the second stage is, you begin to figure out who you are in contrast.
You begin to figure out your identity. Whether you identify as an
anarchist, or trans or a woman. [You say] “I grew up with an anglicized
name, but I’m Chicano, so I will change my name to a Chicano name” or
you take on an African name. You build the clubhouse and you only hang
out with people who are like you. Here’s the anarchist clubhouse,
here’s the feminist clubhouse, here’s the queer clubhouse…, you seek
out that culture because it reinforces your new identity. It helps you
flesh out your new ethics.

Then
you grow out of it, and then you can re-enter the world because you
have a sense of who you are and a sense of place. This doesn’t just
happen to people just in their teens or twenties, it can happen to
people at all stages of their lives. The third phase comes when you can
say “I have a sense of who I am regardless of who I’m with.”

In
political movements we get stuck in the first two phases. Everybody
comes in because they want to reject authority and by the time people
get to the third step, they leave. When they’ve figured out their
identity we don’t have very much activism that keeps people there.

L: How can we change our spaces and culture to retain people as they move through those phases?

s: Activism is a cancer that must be killed, it cannot be reformed. [laughter] That’s what the working title of my book is. [more laughter] No, it’s actually called the The Politics of Possibility,
but I do think activism has to be dismantled like everything else. We
have to tear it apart and begin to really think about it.

All
movements are made of eruptions. We have crises that come up, or
disasters. Anti-war, anti-globalization, Occupy, these are eruptions.
But then what happens between, there are lulls… when we’re supposed to
reassess who we are, heal our wounds, take care of ourselves, and then
be ready. Thousands of people come into the movement [during the
eruptions], but they usually leave in that lull. You’re left with few
people to build infrastructure. Whereas if we
started to build resilient communities and larger infrastructure,
liberatory infrastructure, and I don’t mean only fucking non-profits or
cooperative businesses. I mean infrastructure that meets basic needs:
health care, education, food systems, child care, elderly care, all the
foundations of civil society. so that when the [next] disaster erupts
we already have networks that people can plug into…

Disaster
reveals the failures of capitalism and the state but they also show us
the liberatory potentials and opportunities. Once everything has
failed everybody all the way, when you have nothing, then you can begin
to work together, and that’s where anarchists ideas come in. How do we
do that without the immediate disaster, the immediate crisis? I don’t
know the answer to that.

L:
I think it makes sense to consciously work with people for whom the
ongoing disaster of capitalism is the worst, in our own neighborhoods
and cities. For so many people, it is absolutely undeniable that this
society is a disaster. I think the peasant’s movement in Brazil – I
only keep bringing up Brazil because that’s where I’m from — but
there’s a landless peasants’ movement in Brazil –

s: Yeah of course! I talk about them all the time. It’s one of the greatest autonomous movements.

L:Movimento de Trabalhadores Rurais sem Terra
(MST). There’s a big emphasis in my own community, too, about building
alternative infrastructure, and I think it’s because this idea of mass
movement has already failed in front of our own eyes so many times.

s:
Oh my god, every few years it fails. And every time people are like
“but wait didn’t it work back–” and I’m like no, it never really
worked. The other thing is, when you build infrastructure, how do you
keep it liberatory? How do you build an infoshop or community space and
keep it from becoming a liberal space, how do you make sure it keeps
its liberatory elements? And I don’t know, but I have ideas, and that’s
something I want to explore in my next book. How do we keep things
like Food Not Bombs, or infoshops,
or book-printing, or any of the standard anarchist things that we
build, how do we keep those liberatory? And I think there’s a few
examples we can look to around the world, and the landless peasants’
movement in Brazil is one of them, the Zapatistas is another one.

On Internal Critiques of Anti-fascism

L:
Back to anti-fascism, what advice do you give to someone who hopes to
start and sustain a resilient anti-fascist community in their
neighborhood or city?

s:
I don’t think that you can. I think that the idea of sustainability
and anti-fascism are diametrically opposing ideas. anti-fascist
movements are largely reactionary. They’re very short term, and they
should be, because they’re not about building mass movement, they’re
about direct confrontation, direct communication, direct action to stop
fascism. Because of the reactionary nature of it, you can’t build
sustainability. I think that a good example of that is Anti-Racist Action,
the network. It’s been ineffective and dysfunctional. You could get
500 people to go fight Nazis but you can’t get 500 people to bring down
a prison — not necessarily physically, but to do prisoner support or
to work on larger issues. I remember in the 90’s when Anti-Racist
Action wanted to work on clinic defense, and that was a big [internal]
fight… Now it’s a standard activity for ARA, but at the time it was a
huge controversy. And that’s because of the reactionary politics of it,
it always tends towards fighting in the street because it’s fun and
engaging and can be effective. It tends toward machismo
culture, it tends toward secretive culture, it tends toward young people
with little political experience, who are in that first stage, who
just want to react to something. Which is all necessary and all good
stuff, but you can’t build sustainable socio-political movements or
communities based on that. That’s not what antifa people want to hear,
but that’s the fucking truth of it.

L:
Absolutely, that aligns perfectly with my own experience, to be
honest. In my experiences with organized anti-fascism, they often –
bordering on always – tend to make themselves completely inaccessible
to workers of all ages and backgrounds.

s: You’re goddamn right —

L: Especially those who are not very well-versed in the leftist scene or lingo.

s:
I agree with you 100%. Antifa work doesn’t work with communities of
color or marginalized people, they just take this one stance… You’ve
got a cost/benefit analysis with that too… When fascism was not on the
rise, there would be 10 or 15 of [the fascists] and hundreds of us. But
now, because there’s hundreds or even thousands of them getting in the
streets, and I think it’s important for us to actually be in the
streets to fight them. But it’s a dead end game.

Also
it has mainstreamed, and that’s been very interesting to watch. Even
if the media coverage is very uneven about it, people are talking about
it and asking about it. My mom asked about it. She was like “What the
fuck is antifa?” She knew I was into something called Anti-Racist
Action, but she didn’t know it was anti-fascist, she didn’t know what
it was. But [anti-fascism] is part of the conversation now, and I think
that’s something that couldn’t have happened if you only had liberals
or progressives talking about alt-right versus the left, which is how
they want to frame it. “Alt-left” or whatever the fuck they’re calling
it.

L:
The murder of Heather Heyer and the posthumous labeling of her as an
anti-fascist, I think that was a powerful thing in terms of messaging
because she was such a relatable figure for most people, those who
would say that they hate racists but would not necessarily take the
streets to punch a Nazi.

s: You bring up a really good point. Heather
Heyer looks like everyday anti-fascism. You don’t have to say “I’m
antifa.” If you hate neoliberalism, if you hate racism and white
supremacy, then you’re an anti-fascist. If you hate corporate takeover
the world, you’re an anti-fascist. So I think she actually is an anti-fascist, even though as far as we know she never punched a Nazi.

L:
Because of her being labelled as an anti-fascist in some media
messaging, I’ve seen people in my life who have decried the black bloc
their entire political lives self-identifying as anti-fascists and
offering material support to local people who they know to be taking
the streets. I think that’s really powerful, and I don’t think that
would have happened without people like you speaking in the media and
giving a face to antifa.

s:
And the thing is, it’s working. How many counter-demonstrators, how
many people who identify as anti-fascists used to show up to things?
Maybe hundreds. In Charlottesville you had thousands, but after that —
look at Boston, it was 40,000 people! Look at Berkeley! Look at
Phoenix, where Trump spoke recently, it was like 10,000
counter-protestors there. Those people didn’t consider themselves
anti-fascists last year! But they’re anti-fascists, whether or not
they’re dressing in all black, they’re totally anti-fascists.

L:
Obviously we agree on where anti-fascism is with accessibility. Do you
have any ideas on ways that we can make it more accessible, rather
than just an alternative scene, like for mostly white punk dudes?

s:
I think we already are, just by having conversations about it. We’re
already having a culture shift. I’m actually going to launch something
soon, you’re the first person to know about it. It’s called “everyday
antifa,” and it’s going to be just photos of people, and them
explaining why they’re anti-fascist. It started because there was a
woman here in Austin, probably in her seventies, and she had this
beautiful handwritten sign on the back of her wheelchair. It said, “I
may be in a wheelchair, but I can still chase a Nazi if I have to.”

[laughter]

And I was like “THAT’S AWESOME!” I mean, I would have never
seen that kind of shit before! So I think that despite the media
backlash, that something really good is still happening.

If
we had talked about antifa twenty years ago, I would have said it just
needs to be killed, it needs to end. I was so sick of the reactionary
politics of it. But for fifteen years I’ve been thinking about it and
trying to see the value in it. I think it’s all tied
into killing activism as we know it, and also de-emphasizing street
confrontations. It’s a necessary form [of fighting fascism], but it’s
not the only form. I think in the end it’s about, creating movements
that people can stay in, where they can live and raise families, take
care of their parents, live their lives. Whatever antifa is will be
integrated with that.

People
always talk about Food Not Bombs being liberal, and how ineffective it
is. People say it’s just dirty hippies doing it. But it’s a good
training ground, and they keep it going regularly. Kids come in, it’s a
way for them to figure things out. And then when Hurricane Katrina happened, who were the first people who showed up? Street medics, and fucking Food Not Bombs!All
the different chapters that came, they said “We are willing to break
the law in order to feed you, because we’re anarchists.”So
all of the sudden, you have something that was innocuous in the eyes
of the state, and NOW, it’s liberatory all the way. Is there a
similarity within anti-fascist organizing that has that kind of
crossover? I think we’re seeing
what that is. I think we’re seeing that direct confrontation with
Nazis is its useful part. Now what comes after that is up for debate…
I’m sorry, I’m kind of working through these as we go along because
these are not questions that people ever ask me about.

L:
I appreciate you taking the time to think it through and talk it
through. I want to make sure I understand, you’re saying an effective
way of increasing accessibility is propagating entryist spaces that
have liberatory potential?

s: That’s not my language, but yes. [laughter] That’s so much more academic, but you’re goddamn right!

L: Basically, a space that seems innocuous, or a group or activity that seems relatively unthreatening to authority, but —

s: Well… I think that we need things that have threats to them. I think that the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front
have a chilling effect. So scientists who wanted to use lab animals to
test their products are much more reticent to do so now. I think that
implied threat needs to be there, because they don’t want to be
targeted now. I think the same thing goes for anti-fascism, because if
Nazis are organizing, they need to know that people will be there over
and over again [opposing them].. But everything else that happens
around that, what isn’t direct confrontation, that’s where it’s more
open. That’s where I would agree, where we need other things that would
keep us going.

L:
I love this conversation, because literally the last thing I was doing
before we started this interview is I was tabling for Food Not Bombs,
giving out free food and sharing anarchist literature. [laughter]

s: Yes!

L: Trying to show the threat behind the bagels.

s:
Of course! If we begin to learn that anti-fascism can take many forms,
we can fight in the streets,, and then we can do Food Not Bombs, and
we can also do childcare… things we do that aren’t just all about
fighting in the streets. Having the culture shift, to see it all as a
part of [anti-fascism], then that’s when you start to make it more
accessible.

L:
I think of Food Not Bombs as a way of fighting fascism in the street,
or at least imperialism in the street, because you are confronting
economic inequality head on and trying to reverse its effects. It
doesn’t necessarily present a strong militant challenge to the systems
that create that inequality, but I think it is
a way of fighting in the street. And I’ve been trying, in my
conversations with liberals and moderates, to draw the connections
between various liberatory actions. Actions that seem less threatening
and are as equally anti-fascist.

s: Nice! I think that’s a good hook.

L:
To normalize it. Any time you take resources to the street and
distribute them freely, or offer free medical attention to somebody,
you are doing anti-fascist work because it is fascism and capitalism
that have created these circumstances where not everybody has access to
what we all need to survive. So you don’t necessarily need to punch a
Nazi, you can give somebody a meal, and there, you did it! You are an
anti-fascist.

s: Right, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Everyday anti-fascism…

L:
So to wrap things up, do you have any heartwarming stories of
effective mutual aid-based disaster relief or community defense?
Something you would point to if an outsider asked, “What are you
working towards here? What’s your vision?”

s:
The Common Ground Collective is a great example. It’s not perfect, I
have internal critiques of Common Ground, but I think it’s a great
example because we came to do search and rescue, to find a former
member of the Black Panther Party, a friend of mine, and we ended up
engaging in an armed standoff with white militias. That was
anti-fascist work. And then we proceeded into this relief and recovery
and deeper response stuff and this liberatory potential opened up. Like
you were talking about, the everyday anti-fascist work of food
security, education, and healthcare, in the face of the government. After
Hurricane Katrina, the police were like “you can’t go there,” homeland
security was like “you can’t do that,” so Common Ground volunteers
broke the law every day to provide free food, to provide medicine, to
provide free education, to open up preschools. These were illegal
things to do. It was anti-fascist work, and it was also building
counter-power.

Everything in history
has brought us to this moment – in our personal history, in our
political history, in our social history. And every moment is a new
moment to open up possibilities. I don’t mean this in a fucking
spiritual or abstract way. In every disaster, every lull, there’s that
liberatory potential.

If we know that, then the question is, how’s it gonna look?

scott
crow is an international speaker, author and storyteller who is
proudly from a working class background. He has engaged his varied life
as a co-op business co-owner, political organizer, educator and
strategist, activist, filmmaker, dad, and musician. For over two
decades he has focused on diverse sociopolitical issues and the
explorations of creating and exercising counter-power to capitalism,
Power and unsustainable civilization.

Luisa Black is a community organizer, community gardener, and all-around community enthusiast based in Norfolk, VA. She believes that there has to be something better, and that we can probably make it together.